I woke up still very sick and running a fever. We had planned to ride East and cross into Argentina because Andrew had not yet received his tourist visa to enter Brazil, but when he checked his email in the morning the visa was in his inbox 🤗🙂 so we decided to go with our initial plan to ride to Rivera and cross the border into Brazil. The instructions in the email said to print out the visa and have two paper copies ready to enter Brazil. We asked our host and he sent us down the road to a shop which could print it for us – we walked there but they did not have wifi and we could not email the file to them – we had to walk back to the hostel where we had wifi, email the document and Andrew then walked back to the shop to pay and pick up 2 colour print outs of the visa. We booked a hotel on the Brazilian side in the border town of Sant’ Ana do Livramento which had secure parking.

We had late breakfast in the common kitchen area in the hostel and used up our cereal, bread, milk and honey as those items are usually not allowed at border crossings – specially the honey. I took more Panadol but it did not help at all and it was a tough day for me.

We picked up our bikes and rode them around to the hostel and packed them on the street before heading off towards Rivera and the border to Brazil. We had looked up where the actual border was in town and it was located at a shopping mall – we used some of our remaining Uruguayan cash for fuel and when we arrived at the shopping mall, Andrew went inside to buy tissues for my continuously runny nose. I stayed with the bikes and ate my last two hard-boiled eggs and the last avocado we had left. In the carpark, we met a farmer who spoke English and he told us he had been to Australia and to the US.

We went to the border control section and got stamped out of Uruguay and into Brazil. Andrew did not need the paper copies of the Visa after all the effort of us getting them earlier in the morning. The young officer said that this was all we needed. We still had the TIP for our motorcycles from Uruguay, so we went back to the female Uruguayan officer and asked about the TIP- she told us we had to go to the Aduana (customs) office in town and she showed us where it was on the map. So we rode there and parked in the street and I went into the building first and a female customs officer told me that they are only dealing with the exit from Uruguay and she took our TIP off us and that we needed to go to the Brazilian customs station next to get a new TIP for Brazil allowing us to temporarily import our motorcycles into Brazil. We took off to get to the Brazilian customs office building but my maps somehow sent us way out of town into a rural area – we ended up on unpaved dirt roads and clearly not where customs was – a couple on a scooter stopped next to us and asked where we wanted to go – we realised that Portuguese was very different to Spanish and we did not understand anything – they did point us in the right direction and Andrew put it in his phone and we followed the instructions from google maps and eventually arrived at the building 10 minutes before the closing time of 5:00pm. We went into the office together and the receptionist went and asked the female officer if she would still process us and luckily she was willing to process both of us at the same time – we sat down and she was very thorough and we had to use a translating app to understand what she was asking and answer all her questions – she printed 3 copies of each TIP which we signed and by 17:16 – well past their closing time, we were finally officially in Brazil 🤗🙏🇧🇷- what a complicated and difficult border to negotiate😳. I was meanwhile running a very high fever and just needed to get to the hotel and get some rest.

We arrived at the hotel and wanted to enter their parking garage when a friendly attendant told us to follow him to where we could park and he told us to ride on the pavement to the next garage door where we entered and were shown a place to park the bikes. We checked in and went to dinner in the restaurant adjacent to the hotel and I really needed a drink – it had been a long tough day for me and luckily I remembered from the Brazilian restaurant I used to go to in Vienna with my parents and my children when we visited that there was this Brazilian drink called Caipirinha and I ordered one with dinner and the waiter even understood my pronunciation – 😉🍸 – the only Portuguese word I know 😂🍸